You too may have been astounded by the opening line of a Bloomberg wire story that appeared recently in this newspaper: “Cupcakes might be addictive, just like cocaine.”

Just like cocaine? Now they’ve got our attention.

The article went on to explain that fatty foods and sweet drinks “can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions” to drugs, changing “the way the brain is wired.”

This is interesting, to be sure, if not altogether unexpected. Even those of us who aren’t overweight hardly need to be told that the desire for another helping of dessert or other sweets — and let’s not even talk about the various types of chips — can be all but irresistible. And that reflects just the normal human craving for sugar and fats. If the desire becomes worse for those who stuff themselves with such food on a regular basis, then “addiction” — as loaded as the term might be — could even be apt.

The question is what to do with the conclusion. One obnoxious possibility: Let’s portray major food companies as crack dealers — or as the equivalent of rogue tobacco companies that must be reined in through litigation and regulation.

“This could change the legal landscape,” Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, told Bloomberg. “People knew for a long time cigarettes were killing people, but it was only later they learned about nicotine and the intentional manipulation of it.”

Exactly how the lies and denials of the tobacco industry are analogous to the use of sugar in fattening foods is not readily clear, but I’m betting it won’t be long before a legal brief explains the mystery. And I have little doubt we’ll see similar comparisons regularly in the coming years.

Indeed, another one surfaced in Sunday’s Denver Post in a commentary by the vice president of policy at the Colorado Health Foundation. “A half-century ago,” declared Shepard Nevel, “the tobacco industry fought back with tragic success on the emerging research about the dangers of smoking. Their weapon of choice was advertising. The purveyors of Chesterfield, Philip Morris, Old Gold, Pall Mall, Cigarlet, and Camels produced among the most effective — and shameless — ad campaigns of the 20th century.”

Nevel was provoked into this history lesson by what he considered the unconscionable influence of corporations such as “Coca-Cola, Del Monte Foods​ and ConAgra” in blocking certain school lunch nutrition rules proposed by the USDA. Those and other food producers convinced the likes of Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, both Democrats, to lead resistance to a crackdown, respectively, on potatoes and pizza.

By all means let’s have a free-wheeling debate about lunch nutrition rules. My own take: Udall’s defense of potatoes was a worthy cause but that it’s absurd to count the tiny amount of tomato sauce on a slice of pizza as a vegetable. Yet the point here is not who’s right about the rules but that it’s ugly and illegitimate to invoke the deceptions of tobacco companies when engaging in this debate.

Smoking is inherently unhealthy. Eating pizza is not. Many of us in fact make pizza at home — as well as ice cream, french fries, cheesecakes, muffins, cupcakes and many other foods on the anti-obesity movement’s hit list. Demonizing the producers of foods that are and will remain commonplace, but that should not dominate our diets, is grotesquely unfair.